This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts…
Our public politicians fear those who – much like the ownership class in the Soviet Union circa 1980s – have already decided what debt to write down, which investments to consolidate, and how to profit from the coming collapse of government debt, and governments, around the planet. Our first priority may be to recognize that the public enemies called out by our frightened politicians may be nascent heroes, future martyrs, and standard bearers.
This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts, piling on a repeated President Biden theme of trying to deal with “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement.”
The nation recently discovered that the FBI has a new “MAGA Extremist” category. All this hard work by government is aimed at “preserving democracy.” Clinton is particularly concerned about the small extremist “tail” wagging the House Republican caucus, and destroying not only decorum, but the institution itself.
It is tempting to be mildly entertained by all of this, but as Tho Bishop noted “Weak regimes are particularly dangerous.” The Western/NATO/Blackrock conversation about Ukraine turned to “next steps” many months ago. Our current weak regime here at home – a group of dominant state beneficiaries looking down the barrel of a financial, societal, and military hegemonic collapse trifecta– is also considering next steps for us.
Beyond hunting down MAGAts, and perhaps loading them on trains for deprogramming somewhere, what else is coming, and what can we learn now that will help?
We can learn from the collapse of the USSR in 1989, a seemingly sudden breakdown of what appeared to be a strong and centralized federal state, that had in actuality lost control of the economy, the culture, and the narrative at least a decade earlier. People and regions itching for independence, and those challenging the narrative, were enemies of the State. At the end of that story, what remained were many of the same political oligarchs, many of them internationalized, in control of most of the former USSR’s economic and natural resources. The poor, invested in and dependent upon socialist promises, stayed poor, and many got poorer.
For several years, the death rate climbed in Russia. Power shifted, but maybe not as radically as we were told. While we celebrate Gorbachev as the leader who made the end of the USSR possible with restructuring and transparency – many Russians saw, and experienced, what happened a little differently.
It just seems like the world’s fourth largest military should be able to spot and stop a bunch of guys yelling “Allah!” Just like our own Military Industrial Complex, the greatest defense system the world has ever seen, should have been able to respond to hijacked planes flying around for over an hour.
Our government, naturally, did nothing when Rachel Corrie was murdered by our foremost ally. Just like they did nothing when the Israeli military attacked the U.S.S. Liberty. That event was covered up for decades. More recently, a Palestinian journalist who was an American citizen was shot and killed, not accidentally, by an Israeli soldier.
First of all, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to all the terrorists in the world. They’d been kind enough to stop launching attacks at defenseless civilians for nearly four years. Which coincides with the emergence of COVID-19 into the world. Now, they’re back. Bigger than ever. Can terrorism and COVID coexist?
Israel, despite being about the size of Rhode Island, has the fourth most powerful military in the world the last time I checked. Of course, that couldn’t happen naturally. They had help. Lots of help. From American taxpayers. We built that. But despite the fact they have this magnificent defense system, we are supposed to accept that they were caught by surprise by Hamas, who’d been hibernating along with Isis, Isil, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-CIAeda since early 2020. Evidently, even they were afraid of a viral strain that still hasn’t been isolated (i.e., proven to exist). Terrorists don’t scare easy. But then again, the terrorists caught the most powerful defense system the world has ever seen- our Military Industrial Complex- by surprise as well on 9/11. I wonder if the security cameras were working in Israel?
With the great success the tallest Arab the world has ever seen had on 9/11, you’d think he would have hatched more nefarious schemes from his secret cave. After all, we’ve done nothing to upgrade our ancient power grids. And with most of the sensors provided by China, it should be pretty easy for any aspiring terrorist to take them out. Mild winds and light rain can do that. And what with the wide open southern border, they should be able to sneak some suicide bombers in there, alongside the drug lords and battle-aged male migrants. Nobody’s checking anything. It’s America 2.0. Take off your COVID masks and start looking for “sleeper cells.” If you see something, say something! I wonder if “White Supremacists” are still our greatest threat?
I haven’t seen any comments from politicians, along the lines of, “Gee, we really need to stay out of that crazy place. It’s none of our business!” They could follow up with, “Our infrastructure hasn’t been upgraded in over 60 years. The disparity of wealth is larger than ever. They claim we’re somehow running out of water. People are crapping in the streets.” Funny, we used to be concerned when dog owners didn’t pick up their crap from the street. But no one’s even cleaning up the human waste. That’s really not fair to dogs. Why can’t they crap in the street and have no one worry about it? Don’t dogs have rights, too? Someone call the ASCPA.
When your own home is as dilapidated as America’s is, you don’t worry about fixing the neighbors’ houses first. When your own kids are starving, you don’t buy food for the neighbors’ kids. Sorry if that sounds like America First, but charity begins at home. But let’s say your society is run by a corrupt criminal elite, whose souls have been figuratively or literally sold to Satan. Then you’d want to distract from your voluminous bad deeds. You’d want to construct foreign hobgoblins, to use the great H.L. Mencken’s term, to keep the public pleading with you to keep them safe. Hitler, Castro, Hussein, Qadaffi, Bin Laden- a murderer’s row of bogeymen.
But the greatest collective hobgoblin, since the 1970s or so, has been “terrorism.” As has been said, one man’s (or woman’s, or transgender’s) terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. George Washington and the Minute Men would have gone down in history as despicable terrorists if we had lost the War for Independence. And England didn’t come over and take our land, then literally claim we never existed, as was done to the Palestinians. Sure, Palestine can be found on old maps, but that doesn’t matter to the most die-hard Zionists. They will tell you “there was no such thing as Palestine.” It’s bad enough, when the world’s greatest military powers arm your religious rivals to the teeth, and steal your land. But then to claim you never existed?
Tulsi Gabbard made an ass out of herself by proclaiming, “We stand with Israel.” RFK, Jr. has already made amends for sharing some tweets from Roger Watters. Who can forget him running out and waving the Israeli flag in a parade? Nikki Haley is demanding that the Palestinians be wiped out. At least that’s the way I interpreted her comments. That’s bound to give Trumpenstein a healthy orange erection. DeSantis is probably scheduling his next trip to the Wailing Wall. The new Speaker of the House, Steve Scalise, shockingly expressed wholehearted support for Israel. Never let it be said that our politicians aren’t consistently willing to court controversy.
Fox News should just superimpose the Israeli flag behind every one of their talking heads. Dan Bongino dropped the MAGA stuff and almost tearfully warned us how dangerous the situation is now. In this country. He advised us to keep looking over our shoulder. There could be a terrorist, or even a “sleeper cell,” behind the local McDonald’s. Anyone named Mohammed is suspect. Didn’t conservatives like Bongino rightfully decry the COVID fear porn? What exactly is he selling, other than fear porn? I heard ominous predictions about “terrorism” going back to the 1980s. We need more money to combat terrorism. And Israeli really needs it. Could Israel even exist without our financial aid? How are they anything but a welfare state?
I’ve analyzed what videos are out there of the Hamas attack, and they consist mostly of lone individuals being dragged from cars, or bodies lying in various places. Lots of Arabs jumping up and down and shouting. I caught an “Allah” or two. I don’t know what the greatest mass attack on civilians ever seen, which is what some histrionic commentator called it, is supposed to look like. Just like I said I didn’t know what a pandemic was supposed to look like, but it shouldn’t look like those empty hospital videos. One photo of what we were told was a naked Israeli woman (she was not naked), looked, well…how do we put it? As I pointed out on Twitter, her right leg appeared to have been in an impossibly contorted position. Shades of the backyard photos that helped to incriminate Lee Harvey Oswald.
The bloody bodies that I saw reminded me very much of the footage from the Boston Bombing. Dave McGowan analyzed all that brilliantly, before he developed a Jack Ruby- style of galloping cancer. And died on November 22. You can’t make that up. If I wanted to create a “terrorist” video, I think I’d hire a bunch of guys who looked Arabic, and tell them to jump around and shout something the audience wouldn’t understand. Whoop it up, like the Indians used to do in Hollywood productions. But I’m not a filmmaker, so what do I know? I’m just a community college dropout, using my critical thinking ability to make observations.
It just seems like the world’s fourth largest military should be able to spot and stop a bunch of guys yelling “Allah!” Just like our own Military Industrial Complex, the greatest defense system the world has ever seen, should have been able to respond to hijacked planes flying around for over an hour. Sure, they were armed with box cutters and plastic knives, but I feel confident even an entirely transgender military unit could have stopped them. And this was in 2001, back when there were only two genders. Men were still sometimes not telling if they were asked. There were no transgender armed forces. It’s a “Support the Troops thing,” you wouldn’t understand.
I want to make it clear that I condemn all atrocities. I write a lot about them in my books. Many were committed by us, not “terrorists.” I doubt any terrorist could kill some 39,000 toddlers, like we did during the bombing of Dresden, one of the meccas of culture in the world, and absent any military value whatsoever. But that was done by “good guys,” in a “good war.” So it’s all cool. If Hamas, whatever it is, and however it was formed and is financed, killed women and children in Israel, that’s a horrific thing. Of course, we mourn for those losses. Civilians should never be targeted by armies, in Israel now, or during Sherman’s “march to the sea” during the Civil War.
Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian civilians, including children. Just don’t mention that to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Rachel Corrie was an American activist who unwisely sat down in protest, in front of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer. The brave Israeli soldier bulldozed her to death. And then demolished the Palestinian home she was trying to protect. The IDF has destroyed an unknown number of Palestinian residences like this. I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem right to give billions to those doing the bulldozing, while castigating those who escape the bulldozers and dare to protest. My Substack is called “I Protest,” after all. When your land is stolen, and then the area allotted to you constantly shrinks, you should be protesting.
Our government, naturally, did nothing when Rachel Corrie was murdered by our foremost ally. Just like they did nothing when the Israeli military attacked the U.S.S. Liberty. That event was covered up for decades. More recently, a Palestinian journalist who was an American citizen was shot and killed, not accidentally, by an Israeli soldier. They even know the soldier’s identity. And yet, Joe Biden, friend of the Squad, which fights for Palestinian rights, hasn’t attempted to extradite that soldier for prosecution. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard AOC, or Ilhan Omar, or any other “Woke” activist comment on this, either. It’s funny, because usually they’re so vocal.
Israel has used White Phosphorus on the people in Gaza, another war crime. Israel has given all people in north Gaza, 1.1 million human beings, 24 hours to move to south Gaza. That is impossible and will not happen. It is an attempt of ethnic cleansing.
If Israel makes, as announced, a ground attack on Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon is likely to attack Israel. The U.S. has allegedly let Syria know (via France) that Damascus, and President Assad personally, would be attacked if that were to happen. This is a miscalculation. It is far from certain that Assad, or even Iran, has the means to hold Hizbullah back.
A U.S. attack on the government of Syria would bring Russia into the war. Iran would also respond which is exactly what some of the neocons want.
What is the reason for the ‘Al-Aqsa Deluge’, as Hamas had named its terror operation against the Zionists?
On October 8 Alastair Crooke, one of most experienced Middle East hands, wrote in AlMahadeen:
“Israel” has shattered into two equally weighted factions holding to two irreconcilable visions of “Israel’s” future; two mutually opposing readings of history and of what it means to be Jewish.
The fissure could not be more complete. Except it is. One faction, which holds a majority in parliament, is broadly Mizrahi — a former underclass in Israeli society; and the other, largely well-to-do liberal Ashkenazi.
Mizrahi are mostly the original Middle Eastern Jews and often on the religious far right, Ashkenazi are mostly liberal European ones. The current Netanyahoo government is the first which includes far-right Mizrahi ministers.
Most Mizrahi follow the Sephardi religious rites. They want an religious state based on Jewish law. They are as radial as ISIS.
The high court of Israel has 14 Ashkenazi judges and one Mizrahi one. It is one of the reasons why the Netanyahoo government wants the parliament to be able to vote down high court judgements. There have been large, U.S. sponsored ‘regime change’ protests in Israel against that move. The leaders of the military and security services, mostly Ashkenazi, have also opposed the government move against the court.
I therefore think that it is quite possible that there was intelligence pointing to the Hamas attack, but that it was not revealed to let Netanyahoo fall into a trap. We have however no evidence that there were reasonably precise intelligence warnings, or that they were held up.
There are already demands for Netanyahoo to go. If only for his long term sponsoring of Hamas as a counterweight to the more secular Fatah Palestinians. Should he no longer be prime minister the courts will take up the three bribe cases against him which are currently pending. He would likely end up in jail.
Another reason for Hamas’ success was the fact that three of the four infantry battalions, with 800 soldiers each, that usually guard the Gaza strip, had been moved to the West Bank to protect right-wing Zionist settlers during a religious holiday. This allowed for Hamas’ easy breach of the fence.
Similarly, private security companies watch over shopping malls, factories, colleges, and other facilities. It’s also a big business. The government’s “services” are inadequate despite high taxes, so people find alternatives, and businesses respond, fully liable when they screw up. That doesn’t happen with government police.
So we’re taught to believe that the government’s motives are purer — the unselfish pursuit of the “public interest” by “public servants.” That supposedly makes them superior to the profit-seekers, no matter how effective real producers of wealth — entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and workers — are.
Government facilities and services — which are actually disservices overall — are called “public” while services that are efficiently responsive to the public are dubbed “private.” Why is that?
That way of framing the distinction could be intended to subtly denigrate the marketplace, or “private sector,” where profit “selfishly” motivates people who, in the process, improve strangers’ lives every day. That sector’s record is noticeably better than the “public sector’s.” So we’re taught to believe that the government’s motives are purer — the unselfish pursuit of the “public interest” by “public servants.” That supposedly makes them superior to the profit-seekers, no matter how effective real producers of wealth — entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and workers — are.
The Public Choice school of political economy has established the more common-sense view that people don’t become morally superior to the rest of us when they take government jobs. They’re just people, except that the perverse incentives unique to the political/bureaucratic realm differ drastically from the productive incentives that distinguish the enterprise realm. We should call government jobholders “public” self-servants to lay bare that basic fact. They may be sincere in their rationalizations about helping people, but that doesn’t change what they do — coerce people, starting with the taxpayers. In contrast, people in the market have to ultimately satisfy free consumers or find something else to do.
Think about what we know as the public schools. Has anyone ever heard of a school that wasn’t open to members of the public? Who else is there? Great Britain has it closer to the truth. Public schools are called “private schools,” and government schools are called “state schools.” Since everywhere you look, parents have to pay for the lousy and expensive government system whether or not they send their kids there, and many parents can’t afford to pay twice, we might call the government’s facilities “conscript schools.”
But they are called “public” because that’s who owns them — theoretically, but not realistically.
Then we have White House spokesman John Kirby breaking down and crying on live TV, overcome with emotion about Israeli deaths. Meanwhile, this same person advocates pumping arms into Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, without a tear shed for those deaths.
Think cluster bombs that don’t explode until a child picks them up and cancer causing depleted uranium weapons.
In a nationwide televised address, U.S. President Joe Biden did his best to sound righteous and angered by the eruption of violence in the Middle East.
“There are moments in this life − I mean this literally − when pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world,” Biden intoned with phony gravitas. “The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend.”
This American duplicity is nauseating. Slurring his words, Biden has no idea what he is talking about or how culpable he and his nation are in the violence.
Then we have White House spokesman John Kirby breaking down and crying on live TV, overcome with emotion about Israeli deaths. Meanwhile, this same person advocates pumping arms into Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, without a tear shed for those deaths.
This American disconnect is equally nauseating.
Biden promised the immediate supply of advanced weapons to Israel to defend itself against Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, even while hundreds of Palestinian civilians are being slaughtered in revenge by the Israeli military in Gaza.
A U.S. aircraft carrier, missile destroyers and squadrons of fighter jets are also being deployed to the region, in the words of Washington, “deter” any wider violence.
How sickening is this knee-jerk recourse to more militarism and inevitably more violence?
Biden’s invocation of a mysterious “pure evil” to account for the surge in deadly violence may sound righteous and indignant, but the truth is the appalling destruction of life and ongoing war is the result of something more mundane and deliberate – the failure of criminal U.S. policy.
As a long-time Senator, as well as two-time U.S. Vice President and for the past three years incumbent President, Joe Biden must take a sizable share of the blame for this systematic failure and the concomitant bloodshed.
First of all, there is the abject failure of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Decades of neglect and indifference from Washington towards the rights of Palestinians for statehood have created a dead-end that has exploded in violence. Furthermore, successive American administrations have relentlessly and unconscionably green-lighted the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and despicable oppression. Biden has been a particularly slavish booster for Israel’s apartheid regime, saying previously on several occasions in his smart-ass cloying way that if “Israel didn’t exist then the United States would have to have invented it”.
The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.
It’s interesting how last week Israel had no idea what Hamas was up to, and yet this week they know every mosque, school and hospital that Hamas is hiding in.
When you live under an empire of lies you’ll be asked to believe a lot of very stupid things. The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.
"'We spend billions and billions on gathering intelligence on Hamas,' said Yoel Guzansky, a former senior official at Israel’s National Security Council. 'Then, in a second,' he added, 'everything collapsed like dominoes.'" https://t.co/BPaxErkju1
The phrase “Hamas targets” has been all over the news media the last few days in reference to the ongoing attacks on Gaza, which have as of this writing killed over 1,500 Palestinians, a third of them children.
“Israel conducts large-scale strikes on Hamas targets,” reads a CNN headline.
“Israel conducts ‘large-scale strike’ on Hamas targets,” reads the title of a segment for ABC News.
“Israel says it dropped 6,000 bombs so far against Hamas targets,” reads a report by The Washington Post.
Gosh, Israel must have really great visibility into Gaza to know that each of those 6,000 bombs was aimed “Hamas targets” and not just civilian buildings.
I would note that terrorism is usually as stupid as it is evil; see Bosnia, where they got less and less; Chechnya, Syria and Iraq Wars II and III where they lost outright. Osama’s nemesis, the Saudi monarchy, still stands, and with as degenerate a self-worshiper in the Crown Prince position as he could have ever feared. Hamas may very well not survive this.
With terrorism, as with all asymmetric political action, “the action is in the reaction of the opposition,” as Saul Alinsky, the leftist activist, put it in his book Rules for Radicals.
This isn’t conspiracy stuff, nor impossible “4th dimensional chess” – it’s just plain, old 2-dimentional chess. That’s all:
Hamas, al Qaeda, and similar groups slaughter civilians – beheaded babies or not, they certainly murdered hundreds and hundreds of innocent, civilian Israeli non-combatants in this one (including an extended family member of mine) just as they slaughtered thousands on September 11 – for a reason, not simply because they are angry or devils. It’s a tactic. They are trying to provoke a reaction.
They are trying to make you angry, to make you hate, even drive you crazy. Yes – yes – for the purpose of making the more powerful force (i.e. the United States, Israel) do even worse to their own people, such as getting the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and getting Israel to bomb the Gaza strip. Not that al Qaeda was from Afghanistan, but that’s where they were and that’s who they knew were gonna get it. (Also, by the way, U.S. support for Israel’s crimes in Palestine and Lebanon was a huge part of the motive for al Qaeda’s war against the United States in the first place, including for some of the most important pilot hijackers and organizers of the plot.)
This is then meant to provoke still further counter-reactions. It “heightens the contradictions” as the commies used to say. It forces leaders of Muslim states and armed groups everywhere to take a stand. It destroys stability and negotiations and progress, radicalizes new groups and forces everyone back into the fight on one side or the other. It makes every sock-puppet princeling of the Gulf take a stand in support like the Ayatollah or sell out in silence in the most embarrassing way, like Crown Prince bin Salman, etc.
It’s the same reason Bosnian Muslim forces butchered Serbs and Chechen Muslim forces butchered Russians and ISIS slaughtered Shi’ites: to provoke a worse crisis for everyone in the hopes that the overall situation changes to their advantage.
How many Americans realize that their government gives over a billion dollars of their tax money to Egypt every year? And, of course, it is not just Egypt. The United States also gives other countries billions of dollars in foreign aid every year.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has accused Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife of “accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for the senator, with help from his wife, using his position from 2018 to 2022 to benefit the Egyptian government, including on foreign military financing and foreign military sales.”
All in a day’s work for a member of Congress.
Menendez was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, until he was pressured to resign from the committee. He is accused of “providing Egyptian officials sensitive information about U.S. embassy employees in Cairo; ghost-writing a letter for Egyptian officials to U.S. senators, asking them to support the release of $300 million in aid; and approving or removing holds on foreign military financing and exports of defense equipment to Egypt.”
Turns out that “Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and House foreign affairs panels have the option to place holds on large foreign weapons sales and the transfer of Foreign Military Financing funds, which are grants the State Department provides to foreign governments to buy U.S. weapons.”
The real problem here is the foreign aid itself, not the shenanigans of Senator Menendez.
In 2022, the fiscal 2022 appropriations deal made $320 million in foreign aid to Egypt contingent upon Cairo meeting certain human rights benchmarks. However, it also allowed the Biden administration to use a waiver for up to $235 million. In the end, only $85 million in aid was withheld.
Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says “he supports blocking $235m in military aid to Egypt over human rights concerns.” However, the largest chunk of aid, $980m, “was not subject to such restrictions and will go ahead.”
The same pitfalls of well-meaning Americans going on the internet and crying for the United States to involve itself in ethnic conflicts applies just as well in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as in the case of Ukraine.
Here we go again. Last week, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, likely provoked into action by its Iranian backers, launched an attack on the state of Israel, killing (at the time of writing) around 900 civilians and capturing Israeli soldiers, parading some of them on the internet, including women soldiers. Watching these videos is a revolting experience.
The State of Israel is already retaliating with attacks on the Gaza strip, but, predictably, neo-cons and liberal imperialists are already sounding the charge for yet another foreign intervention overseas. If you only listened to people on Twitter, you would think that Hamas had attacked the United States and not the State of Israel. I’ve written about this phenomenon in these pages before, but it seems that Americans of pretty much every political stripe are treating this conflict the same way that they have treated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as a proxy for their personal political preferences.
In the case of Israel, there is at least more reason for the leap to defend a country halfway across the world. Unlike Ukraine, the United States has a long-standing relationship with the State of Israel, going back to its foundation in 1948. And ideologically, Israel has long been the most “Western-style” democracy in the Middle East, and so it makes a far more natural ally than the fragile kleptocracy that is the Ukrainian government.
But the same pitfalls of well-meaning (and perhaps not so well-meaning) Americans going on the internet and crying for the United States to involve itself in ethnic conflicts applies just as well in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as in the case of Ukraine. The attacks on the State of Israel, though horrific, are no threat to its existence, and they in no way threaten the United States or its interests.
Then why do people insist upon calling for America to be involved then? The reasons, such as they are, are various. Some genuinely seem to believe that America is and should be the world’s policeman, putting down conflict everywhere it flares up. Neocons and others identify “democracy” (i.e., political and social freedoms largely unique to Western civilization) with American power, and so they wish to spread these by intervening in such conflicts abroad.
But most people are not Neocons nor are they that into democracy. In fact, most elites are not either, and they are the ones that really matter, especially when it comes to foreign policy. So, why do they go along with this?
They do so mainly because support for the “good guys” in distant ethnic conflicts is a type of “luxury belief” that is easy for the high and mighty to latch onto. A “luxury belief” is one that elites embrace as a means of signaling their status. Rather than physical displays of wealth, luxury beliefs indicate one’s status in a higher, more morally virtuous elite. Embracing these beliefs is a way of maintaining one’s status in a world where wealth and the physical signs of status are increasingly available to non-elites.
